DNA on pizza is just a cover story for a $HUGE_INVASION_OF_PRIVACY.

e.g. they probably asked NSA/Verizon/etc whose cellphones were in the house in the last few weeks.

someone watched movie 2012, and thought... aha.... what if... a floating ball! And before you know it, we got a product out there.

The employer is bound to low ball you. That's just game theory. Unless you negotiate, you lose. Lets they the average dev in their company makes $95k, they're bound to offer you $90k. Or even $95k, which is "fair" in some sense. Now, the difference between an average dev and a "pretty good" dev is not just a 10% gain in productivity... often a good dev is 10-100x as productive, and often means success or failure of the entire project. How much is that worth to the company? They'll be able to hire an average dev with their offer, but they won't ever get a pretty good dev on their team ("pretty good" dev will often ask for 4-6x the "average" salary).

(and everyone has seen those places, with teams of 50 "average" developers unable to do anything in less than a year... and fail spectacularly a year later).

It also means that the quality of the folks they hire will go down quite dramatically (just about nobody I know accepts the first offer from the employer).

wasted billions of dollars and need to build a better instrument. ...and that wasn't the point?

You're on a tech site... which means a good percentage of the folks here would agree that the damn airplane should be smart enough not to crash---even if the pilot directs it right at the mountain---the damn airplane should just refuse to destroy itself (yes, there's that remote possibility of sensor malfunction where the pilot "knows better"... well... those don't malfunction as often as humans, and also, we can build better and more sensors... we can't build better humans).

What would you study ?

How to build automation to replace the other 50%?

There are plenty of community/city/state schools that are dirt cheap (e.g. 2-3k per semester, 4-6k a year). Also, average student debt in the country is ~$25k or so, I'd hardly call that a 'lifetime of debt'... (yes, fresh graduates can't pay it off in a year, but that's why they're not all due in a year). And if you work on the side (yes, tough, many folks had to do this) you can graduate with no debt at all. And then there's financial aid (if you *really* cannot afford it).

Now, if you're getting an acting degree from NYU and end up with $150k in debt and no job... well then, that's just poor decisions right there.

It works the other way with medical degrees. Yes, the degree is "expensive" by `normal' standards, but a doc is expected to earn 2-3x that debt per year... so dollar mounts a skewed.

The cameras wouldn't be there to help in *that* incident. It would be there to help document and train for situations that might happen on future flights---situations that may not be as clear cut at this particular incident. The argument that it would not improve aviation safety is silly...

I can imagine a situation where Lenovo (or Dell, etc.) keep it unlocked for their "business" customers (e.g. Thinkpad line), and lock for everyone else... In a few years, that would pretty much kill off linux for anyone who casually wants to try it out on their then-"old" laptop.

Very likely the reverse.

I'd imagine that most accidents involving automated cars will *provably* (video and telemetry info and all that) be human operator's fault (or the other driver)... suddenly humans will find their insurance go sky high, while insuring a self driving car will be dirt cheap (they'll be harder to steal too).

All your concerns are valid, BUT, do you really think that "average human driver" makes the right decisions that much better than the potentially *random* behavior an automated car will display in all these extreme scenarios? Yes, lets say an automated car runs over a child (and saves the dog)... but do you really think the "average human drive" would do any better???

My guess, automated systems will prove to be several orders of magnitude safer overall than current human operators... there will still be accidents, but they'll be much more rare (and perhaps much more deadly, but if accident rate goes to 1% of what it is now, that would be huge---so much so that human driving may actually be banned on most streets).

Kind of like "most car accidents involving trucks" are *not* caused by the truck driver mistake... the future automated car accidents will probably not be caused by computer error, but by someone being stupid around one.

Imagine everyone staying in lane, maintaining speed, distance, etc. And actually driving the posted speed limit on city streets (even automation wouldn't have much problem slowing down from 25mph for a child (or dog, or tumbleweed) on the road).

Laser Diode Arrays with remaining eye.

In that case, R wouldn't help them either. You really need to understand how you're solving the problem before you throw some R at it and suddenly get an answer.

And the Earth Stood Still.....today.